In Absentia

So, um, I haven’t been blogging much lately. I’m teaching three classes (two preps) this summer as well as working on some curriculum projects, so I have fodder for ideas, but each time I’ve started an entry, I’ve decided against posting it. See, I’ve been..ahem…a little cranky about my students lately. I decided I wanted to blog about the process of teaching, about solving problems, and the past few weeks, I’ve been swallowing irritation more than inspiration.

It happens. Teachers get cranky. I know how to keep it out of my classroom and my interactions with students, but it is more difficult to keep crankiness from coloring self-reflective writing. While I don’t want to write a complaining blog, I also don’t want to represent myself as a teaching Pollyanna. Therefore, I thought I’d share the titles of my rejected blog postings with everyone, and let readers’ imaginations fill in the blanks. Frankly, anyone who has taught for a while knows how these entries go:

• Seriously? Seriously? No Book Again?

• I’m Rubber; They’re Glue: How to Keep Students from Bouncing All the Thinking Back on the Teacher

• Summer Students: A Breed all Their Own

• Yes, Virginia, When You Repeat a Class, the Content is the Same

I’ll get over it; certainly, it’s not as if I just met these education problems! Sometimes, thinking about teaching yields the results I need, and sometimes, a cognitive break is in order. To everything there is a season, and frankly, June may be the season for a break whether we stop teaching or not…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

What I Don't Know for Sure

Recently, I had an experience where a student clearly appeared to have cheated. Turnitin.com showed that the student’s essay matched a classmate’s essay by 47%. The classmate and the student in question had been in the same peer review group, and the classmate’s draft contained the material first.

My body reacts to such discoveries. I get hot. I bite the inside of my cheeks. My mind swirls with a mix of emotion: shock, disgust, embarrassment, and anger. My gut wants to lash out at such a student, to explain at length how such a blatant act of stealing violates our writing community and insults me as an instructor. Then the worry and guilt sets in: What kind of class have I created where a student feels such desperation when confused? Why didn’t the student see me as more accessible, whatever the challenges with the assignment might have been?

Over the years, I’ve learned to let these reactions wash over me. I entitle myself to that experience, but I don’t act upon it. When I confront a student about such a situation, I limit myself to reporting events, explaining implications, and opening a discourse. Here’s what I wrote to this particular student:

Student X, your Turnitin.com report shows that significant portions of your essay match Student Y’s essay. In your group thread for peer review of Essay One, these passages are original to Y’s draft, not your draft. It appears you lifted chunks of Y’s essay and represented them as your own in this essay.

Please explain.

Ms. K

Whew! It takes lots of restraint to write a relatively inert response like that, but over the years, I’ve learned how little I know in these situations. I’ve drawn conclusions, acted accordingly, and ended up with egg on my own face. By granting students a bit more rope, I can gather more information before committing to a course of action. I do this process because I’ve benefited from it in the past, but this time, I truly thought my narrative for the data was indisputable.

Not for the first time, I was wrong. The student explained what happened, and while the student clearly used bad judgment, the person hadn’t been guilty of all the things I’d imagined. Even though I thought my note asking for an explanation should earn me a nomination for sainthood, the student started by telling me that my note created feelings of “bafflement and humiliation.” I actually think both those reactions are called for, so I’m okay with that, (alright, maybe not "humiliation...") but the student’s response made me very happy that I’d refrained from responding to the paper with the vitriol I’d felt.

So in the end, my accumulating experience teaches me how little I know for sure. Students, with their variable human nature, create new and unique ways of mangling text each semester!

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Recreation

'Tis that special time of year when teachers of all shapes, sizes, and ideological persuasions find themselves humming Alice Cooper. Even for those of us who teach summer programs, June, July, and August just feel more relaxed.

Part of my summer recreation is catching up on all the television I miss during the year because it comes on after 9 p.m. I feel secure enough in this education forum to confess that I cannot watch television shows that begin after 9 p.m. I fall asleep right there on the couch. Teaching requires early rising and to compensate, I take to my bed around 9 p.m. So, no, friends with jobs outside of education, I didn’t see Lost or Grey’s Anatomy or House or…or…or…I read the reviews in the paper and then I catch up via Netflix or Hulu during the summer. (Oh, yeah, I don’t have a TiVo either. Truly lame public educator here…)

So as I clicked through Hulu for things I’ve missed, I stumbled upon Glee. I’d seen a little bit about it in the papers, but I’d written it off as a branch of the doesn't-interest-me High School Musical tree. Then this blurb on the Fox website caught my eye: “Will Schuester, a young optimistic teacher, has offered to take on the Herculean task of restoring McKinley's Glee Club to its former glory. Everyone around him thinks he's nuts. He's out to prove them all wrong.” “A young optimistic teacher?” There’s going to be a television show about an optimistic teacher? Now I could write volumes about how teachers (especially English teachers) have been portrayed in television and movies, but suffice it to say that the more favorable portrayals of teachers show us as resilient under trying circumstances. Optimistic? I don’t think I had ever seen the media group “optimistic” with “teacher,” so I gave Glee a whirl.

Please watch it. We deserve an hour like Glee provides at the end of the school year. It fictionalizes high school just enough. It’s like Election without the bitterness, the Best in Show for high school show choirs. It’s affectionate. It’s effervescent. It makes me want to go see a high school choir competition. It reminds me why I pray my son joins band or choir. The series won’t begin until the fall, but I’m already looking forward to catching up on episodes next summer…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Preparing for the New MLA

When I first heard the news that MLA launched an updated system, I felt a little sick. I’ve created tons of interactive online and hard copy activities to help my students navigate reading and writing MLA Works Cited entries. Because of the hanging indent spacing and variability of monitor size, each online Works Cited entry needs to be imported as an image. (I cheated with my samples here, so if the spacing looks funky, please forgive me. The OWL Purdue link above is dandy!) Days of work await me. Yikes.

Once I looked at the new MLA, however, I began to feel better. The changes make tons of sense, and I think students will understand the format more. Perhaps they will start to understand why I think being able to flip to a reference page and assess the quality of research from the entries is such an important and empowering kind of academic literacy. But now I’m getting ahead of myself…a new documentation style can only promise so much!

The big changes? No more underlining—like APA, MLA now puts publications and book titles in italics. The electronic resource formats have been streamlined somewhat, (We no longer have to identify a database “service”—hooray!) and entries now use “Print” if they are hard copy and “Web” if they’ve been accessed electronically. Here’s a little sample of old versus new:

Book with One Author, old MLA:

Miles, Felix. The Civil War. New York: Random House, 2007.

Book with One Author, new MLA:

Miles, Felix. The Civil War. New York: Random House, 2007. Print.

Journal Article from a Subscription Database, old MLA:

Homiak, Kathleen. “Six Strategies for Taking a Patient’s Health History.” Patient Care Weekly 8.2 (2008): n.p. Academic Search Elite. EBSCOhost. Seminole High School Library. 7 July 2009.

Journal Article from a Subscription Database, new MLA:

Homiak, Kathleen. “Six Strategies for Taking a Patient’s Health History.” Patient Care Weekly 8.2 (2008): n.pag. Academic Search Elite. Web. 7 July 2009.

Well prepared activities help me teach students how to read and write research documentation effectively, so I’m going to put the time in to update my materials. My department has agreed to go with the new MLA this fall, so I’m working on the changes, one exercise at a time. It’s certainly helping me internalize the new format…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Mind Bend

I’m a lucky girl. When I create content for online learning activities, the educational technology experts who work for my school system collaborate with me. Last week, I went to them with a dream. My students still struggle with reading their Turnitin.com reports; they don’t understand when a “match” constitutes plagiarism and when it’s incidental. To help them practice, I imagined creating an activity that branched. If students answer a question correctly, they would continue to a different question than if they answer incorrectly. This way, the activity can provide extra help to students who misunderstand a concept before layering on the next complex circumstance.

The experts greeted my dream with calm nods. “Yup. We can build that. Send us the content.” Oh! Okay! All systems go, right?

Since these magical people agreed to do the technical side, I started sifting through last semester’s Turnitin.com reports for screen shots showing the kinds of matches I want to help students distinguish. After I assembled half a dozen images, I started writing the first question. Question…feedback for correct answer…feedback for incorrect answer—Wait! Stop! I can branch out! Instead of writing feedback for an incorrect answer, I could write another question. In my better teaching moments, I greet student errors with follow up questions, trying to direct students towards the thought process that will yield greater comprehension. Now I could try and structure this computer activity to model that practice. (It’s not that I think the computer can replace me here, but as things currently stand with my students, I am not getting this Turnitin.com report lesson across to everybody. I decided to go down this road because I think students need to process this kind of critical reading independently to fully internalize it.)

Deciding to write a branching activity turns out to be very different than actually writing a branching activity, at least for my non-millennial brain. It hurt as much as my earlier attempts to be non linear. Flow charts and diagrams started to swim in my mind’s eye. How many branches would there be? Would the students answering follow up questions to incorrect responses ever get back to the trail blazed by students giving correct responses? Within half an hour, I felt hopelessly snarled in all the potential variables. My pedagogy bases itself on adaptability, so here I am knee deep in branching online activities when I love linear structure. Gosh, I miss the days of constructing linear activities exclusively. Sigh.

So I spent a few days feeling panicked every time I opened up my attempts at drafting this activity. Finally, I decided to write the activity from beginning to end as if a student answered every question correctly. What would the tree trunk of this branching exercise look like? What breadth am I trying to cover here? I needed to know the answers to those questions. Then, I looked at each question and imagined my follow up questions like traffic pattern clover leaves, looping out from the main trunk only to touch back again with a review loop of that concept planned for later in the sequence.

Will it work? Will it make any sense? Time will tell. I hope this kind of effort yields a differentiated learning tool that serves students well. Right now, I’ve turned the draft over to my tech wonders as I sit in a sweaty heap, exhausted by thinking outside my natural thought patterns. Do my students feel this way all the time? My goodness. No wonder they want to sleep through first period…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Lookin' for Lit in all the New Places

This summer, I’ll be teaching a literature survey course. I expect my students to be ready for the course to be over the day it begins. I’m sure they’ll also be pleasant about it, but I can imagine their palms facing me, thought bubbles above their heads saying, “Nothing personal here, lady. I just want this course to be over.”

Dragging students through literature that I love makes me nutty, so I’m already ruminating about how to approach the course. I construct all my teaching around student ownership, but I’m more successful fostering student ownership of writing than of reading and close analysis of text. Often, my students approach literary analysis wearily, like it’s an endless shell game: “Ms. K, just tell me where the answer is!” Our department also requires a final exam, a multiple choice affair that confirms knowledge of literary terms and basic cultural literacy. Preparing students for this test often elicits lots of “When will I ever need this stuff?”

Traditionally, I use literary circles, and I plan to do that again in this course. I’m also playing with the idea of opening the course by asking students to write on the pink elephant in the room: Why is it required for students to take a literature course? Why would the powers that be think such a course would be important for students?

I want to find a meaningful way to use Wordle, and I’ve got six months of Poetry magazine I want to work in, too. On the Poetry website, they have this fantastic Poetry Tool that searches poems numerous ways, like by occasion! I’ve got to find a way to work that in…When poet Terri Witek spoke at a conference I attended this past fall, she recommended teaching contemporary poetry along with our personal favorites. She reminded us that poetry changes with the times, so we should be sure to include the voices of our students’ times amongst the pieces we feature in lessons. As a student, I know the poets of the eighties and nineties touched me more viscerally than the historical giants, so her point made sense to me. I’m also thinking about how to craft an assignment that asks students to prove whether or not poetry is still relevant, to see what modern incarnations they discover to support their points.

Right now, the ideas are still swirling around in my head, waiting for a specific lesson plan in which to land. The course starts off at the end of June, so I’ve got a little time to play with my plans. Part of me believes lessons planned with excitement and anticipation are bound to work better than any other kind…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Thoughts as I Crawl out from the Grading Pile

Another semester's research essays have been drafted, revised, and graded. I haven’t run a marathon, but I imagine the months of preparing and then the grueling mile after mile with “just five more” miles than seems possible might be a physical facsimile to the mental task of grading multiple class sections of six to eight page research essays. It feels good to be on this side of the finish line!

I’ve shared my trusty research essay grading tool before, but my students remarked that they found my comments especially helpful this semester, so I’ve been thinking about the evolution of my written feedback to students on how to improve their writing. In college, we studied Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, and Nancy Atwell, and fifteen years later, I don’t remember which concepts and influences came from which person. I’ll credit all three of them with forming my dedication to revision. My own schooling did not model revision or teach the writing process. Some of us intuited it and used it either internally or privately; other students struggled.

At this point, my written feedback to students couches itself in the language of revision. While my grading charts and line markings might itemize things that are missing, the language of my end of essay feedback focuses on the next version of the essay (or the way the next assignment should be written). Instead of writing, as I did years ago, “You’ve lost points for writing with second person,” I write, “In your next draft, please avoid second person; use more specific nouns to strengthen your use of third person.” “Frequent comma splices distract from your content” has become “Better editing of your use of the comma will prevent the comma splice from diminishing the power of your prose.” I stopped writing things like, “Pervasive errors with your MLA make your use of research distracting instead of persuasive” and started writing things like “Once you fix your MLA, your integration of research will better support your argument.” I’m not saying this is an earth shattering technique; I think it’s a focus, a perspective, to which students respond, especially touchy, self-esteem-full millennial students. I use the feedback to describe the changes needed to create the next, better, more successful product. For discouraged students, it helps them see the next step. For students lacking editorial judgment, it helps them identify the missing elements that can still be added. It keeps the focus on moving forward.

In recent years (probably since becoming a parent), I’ve noticed my feedback getting peppered with a more parental tone. I write things like, “I’m confident you can create a stronger vehicle for your ideas,” which seems to me an English teacher variation of “Your father and I know you can do better.” I use more phrases like “I enjoyed…, but I wish…” “In the future, I look forward to seeing…” I don’t know when exactly I made this shift, but it seems to be helping. Mostly, I teach discouraged or disinterested writers. I think by using my feedback to imagine a better product for their writing, I am establishing the idea for the first time in their minds. (Gosh, that’s a little depressing, but I’m thinking it may be true…) I took driving lessons from the gym teacher at my high school, and he told me, “The car goes where you’re looking.” I’ve always thought of that as a powerful metaphor for most anything in life. The essay goes where the writer imagines it. Let’s face it--many developing writers don’t give their essays’ horizons much imagining. By sketching a more powerful written product out in my feedback, I’ve nudged more writers towards improvement than when I itemized the troubles within the existing product. Like the influences of wind or surf upon a rock, my revision minded feedback might make small, incremental changes in the way students see their own writing over time. However, at this point in the semester, I’m just glad I can see any change!

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher